The point is austerity in national spending is a terrible answer to thequestion of how to make an economy recover. The absolute worst thing to doin a bad economy is to stop the government spending on core infrastructurewhich helps the economy in the long term. You put more people out of work,who drop out of the income tax paying and discretionary spending pool andpile onto the already bloated unemployment rolls. An economic downturn isthe worst time for blanket austerity, you need to do that in the goodtimes.

Policies which create 60% youth unemployment are simply not a recipe foreconomic recovery or social success. Wasteful policies should be cut backalways but cutting back on basic services is beyond dumb and counterproductive. A functioning economy equals greater tax base. The sooneryou can return to a functioning economy the better, even if it meanstaking on some debt. The payback is non-linear.

If your goal is to drive down the cost of nearby labor or bankrupt yourneighbor so that you can swoop in and buy up their assets cheap, then sure,blanket austerity is a great thing.

Krugman has written many columns on this if you want to get a Nobel prizein economics laureate's take on the situation.

That's such a classically stupid cliche of a line, you should be embarrassed to use it.

> You're goddamn right we are the good guys.

but even the greatest morons are right sometimes.

GP doesn't show much more intelligence. God damn right the USA with its many many flaws is still worlds a better place to be than the mafia state which is Putin's Russia or the Orwellian disco that is modern capitalist China. Humans are notoriously bad at weighing dichotomy but seriously get a grip. Goldmans may be whispering in the ear of the USA government but at least they aren't actively selling the organs of the new age religioners on the open market the way the Chinese are or blatantly executing New York Times columnists on the streets the way the Russians are doing to their own.

The fact that the foundations of the USA are philosophically strong is precisely the reason that the good parts of the USA are worth fighting for. At present the US government may be a bit fucked up and 0wned, but at its core the US Constitution is still a one of humanity's greatest intellectual achievements and worth fighting for tooth and nail.

You guys should really be using Jitsi internally and a local deployment of http://meet.jit.si for communicating with random customers who shouldn't have to install a third party client just to talk to you.

From a technical standpoint (and that's why we're here isn't it?) the Streisand Effect is actively trying to supress a nibble of information that wants desperately to be free. Which isn't really the case here. Here we have the editors silently ignoring an up-rated story on the firehose in the hope that if it goes away they won't get shit from their corporate overlords. They aren't filing public documents to make it so. Presumably they already have got the shit come down from on high and they don't feel that they're completely irreplaceable.

You want to stir the shit? Get the quashing story on Soylent News or wherever people with a beef hang out.

As for me, just another journalistic straw broken in my respect for the good 'ol site.

SourceForge, once a trustworthy source code hosting site, started to place misleading ads (like fake download buttons) a few years ago. They are also bundling third-party adware/malware directly with their Windows installer.

Some project managers decided to leave SourceForge – partly because of this, partly just because there are better options today. SF staff hijacked some of these abandoned accounts, partly to bundle the crapware with their installers. It has become just another sleazy garbage site with downloads of fake antivirus programs and such.

How can I help?

If you agree that SourceForge is in fact distributing malicious software under the guise of open source projects, report them to google. Ideally this will help remove them from search results, prevent others from suffering their malware and provide them with incentive to change their behavior.

An anonymous reader writes: It appears that SourceForge is assuming control of all projects that appear "abandoned." In a blog update on their site, they responded saying in part "There has recently been some report that the GIMP-Win project on SourceForge has been hijacked; this project was actually abandoned over 18 months ago, and SourceForge has stepped-in to keep this project current. "

An anonymous reader writes: Sourceforge staff took over the account of the GIMP-for-Windows maintainer claiming it was abandoned and used this opportunity to wrap the installer in crapware. Quoting Ars:

SourceForge, the code repository site owned by Slashdot Media, has apparently seized control of the account hosting GIMP for Windows on the service, according to e-mails and discussions amongst members of the GIMP community—locking out GIMP's lead Windows developer. And now anyone downloading the Windows version of the open source image editing tool from SourceForge gets the software wrapped in an installer replete with advertisements.

if the fucking thing wasn't being rammed down our throats there wouldn't be an issue. but it is, so people are up in arms about having something they do not want being rammed down their throats.

personally the saddest part of this for me is to witness the political maneuvering which brought this to be invade beautiful debian. it is toxic to the goodwill of the community, which has always been debian's most valuable asset.

When you look at the news today (classic cliche) there's precious littlegood news about the progress of the human race. I guess that's why localrural news about farm shows and parades and even tech news is so engaging.It's the new, the positive, the hope and it's ever a rare thing to witness.